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Readership and circulation
Remember, there's a huge difference between circulation and readership and your customers can easily be confused by salespeople from competing media. Circulation is the number of newspapers that actually circulate in the area. Readership is based on the fact that more than one person might read the same newspaper. The average number of readers who read the same newspaper, or the pass-along rate as some call it, is usually in the area of 2.5 people per copy. So a 100,000 circulation newspaper with 2.5 readers reading each copy would have 250,000 readers.

Most newspapers conduct readership surveys periodically and can tell you exactly what the pass-along rate is, but for most newspapers, it's about 2.5 people. So the next time a potential advertiser says that your competitors have double the circulation that you do, make sure that they're comparing apples to apples and really talking circulation, not readership. You might also want to inquire where the competitors got their pass along rates. Maybe it was just an estimate and not based on any legitimate survey.

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